Ping-ti Ho

Ping-ti Ho (1917–2012; Chinese: 何炳棣; Pinyin: Hé Bǐngdì), was a notable Chinese-American historian. Ho was a former President of the Association for Asian Studies.

Biography

Ho's ancestral hometown is Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, and was born in Tianjin in 1917. In 1934, Ho studied at the Department of History of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and graduated with a BA in 1938. After graduation, Ho went to Yunnan in southwestern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and became a teaching assistant at the Department of History of the National Southwestern Associated University (a university temporarily jointed by the Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University, during the war). In 1944, Ho won and obtained financial support from the Sixth Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship, and went to study in the United States in 1945.

Ho entered Columbia University in New York City, and graduated with a PhD in history in 1952. Since 1948 Ho had already taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia of Canada. In 1963, Ho went to teach at the University of Chicago. In 1965, Ho was promoted as the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Ho retired from Chicago in 1987, but he soon became the Visiting Distinguished Professor of History and Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he retired for the second time in 1990.^[1]

Ho was elected as an academician of Academia Sinica in 1966, a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979, and an honorary member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1997. Ho was also "the first Asian-born scholar ever to have been elected as President of the Association for Asian Studies".^[2]

Ho received several honorary doctorates, including the L.L.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1975, the L.H.D. from Lawrence University in 1978, and the L.H.D. from Denison University in 1988.

Ho had a cousin who was also a famous historian but in China – Ho Ping-sung.

Publications

• Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959)
• The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (1962)
• The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000-1000　B.C. (1975)

References

External links

• The biography of Ping-ti Ho
• Baidu.com Encyclopedia: 何炳棣 (Ping-ti Ho)
• Ping-ti Ho: 我与胡适的交往 (My friendship with Hu Shi)